Webform Tracking Tags (UTM codes) Overview

A key component of your recruitment campaign is understanding which campaign sources are working more and less effectively to bring in participants to your studies. With Ripple, you can create tracking tags, or UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) codes, to tag to the end of your Ripple survey’s URL to help you identify the specific pages and posts where your participants are interacting with your recruitment campaign. 

UTM parameters are small, concise tags that you add to your URL and when someone fills in a survey form from that URL, those tags are sent back to Ripple to track your recruitment campaign’s success. The UTM code is like a keyword-matching system that preloads data into your survey, based on your URL. This information will pull through from your survey into Ripple’s Recruitment Sources and Sites to provide insight on your recruitment campaign’s success. This can help you identify where you are recruiting your participants from and assess where to focus future recruitment efforts.

How to connect UTM codes to Recruitment Sources and Sites 

1. Go into your study’s Recruitment tab and create your Recruitment Sources and Sites. For more information on creating Recruitment Sources and Sites, refer to the article: Working with Recruitment Sources.

2. Go to the Study Settings tab (red), and then navigate to the Survey Creator (green).

3. Using the Survey Designer tab, create your survey questions. Make sure to add questions for the participant’s first name and last name, and link them to the first name and last name survey variables. This will allow Ripple to generate a URL for your survey. For more guidance creating your survey questions, you can get more information from this article: Getting Started Creating Your First Survey.

4. Using the Toolbox, create a Radiogroup type survey question (red) named site (green), and link it to your Recruitment Site variable (purple). Make sure the name of this recruitment site variable is in the Name, not the Title. Be sure that the name matches the case format you plan to use in your URL, this is a case sensitive variable.

5. Copy and paste the survey’s URL into a new window.

6. Add your tracking text to your URL to tell Ripple what information to preload into the survey. In this case, we want to pre-fill that the source was from our Recruitment Site of Facebook Ad 1. To designate that it’s from Facebook Ad 1, we add “?site=Facebook%20Ad%201” at the end of the URL. This will tell Ripple that once traffic comes in from the people who click this link, the traffic should be attributed to Facebook Ad 1. You will want to make sure that the UTM snippet you’re adding to your URL is short and clear, and you’re using a consistent format across your UTM codes.

7. Repeat the steps of modifying the URL and creating UTM codes for your other Recruitment Sites.

8. Go into the Properties for the source and site variables and toggle “Is Visible?” to off. If you do not toggle “Is Visible?” to off, participants will be able to see the questions and the prefilled answers.

9. Save your survey.

10. Embed your modified URLs into your different recruitment campaign locations. Once you have embedded links in your recruitment campaign locations, participants who navigate to those locations will fill in the survey. If you have linked your variable to the Recruitment Site variable, you will see that the Recruitment Source and Recruitment Site will pull through into the participant’s profile card. Upon enrollment, the Recruitment Source and Recruitment Site information will pull through to your study’s Dashboard to provide analytics on where your participants are coming from.